“I have gone to post-book deal hell and all I got was this serious debt. But it's an okay place to be, there are no surprises in debt.”— Porochista Khakpour, amazon.com
“I turn the novel in. I go out to a celebration dinner with a very normal guy I have somehow fallen into dating. I pick at a whole fish and order dessert. I make bathroom visits devoted solely to dropping benzodiazepine crumbs under my tongue, licking any residue off my finger. The novel made it, but…”— Porochista Khakpour, amazon.com
“It was like, my book is on the New York Times bestseller list right now and we do not have any money in our checking account.”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“So I sold my book for $100,000, and what I received was a check for about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the IRS. Don't get me wrong, the book deal helped a lot -- it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn't enough to live off.”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“I had accrued $50,000 in credit card debt to write that book. The same thing happened later with 'Wild', only I was in deeper debt. So I got that check for 'Torch', and it was gone the next day. I actually paid my credit card bill. Poof!”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“I feel strongly that we're only hurting ourselves as writers by being so secretive about money. There's no other job in the world where you get your master's degree in that field and you're like, 'Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million!'”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“Writing for free looked like work. It felt like work. But it was the illusion of work, a fun house mirror reflection.”— Nina Maclaughlin, amazon.com
“The dreamy writer's life I had envisioned in graduate school, crafted by borrowing my more experienced classmates' lofty expectations as well as my tuition funds, seemed inevitable. Six months later, my novel had been rejected by what seemed like every editor in New York City, I was being paid less…”— Julia Fierro, amazon.com
“Today, I own approximately three thousand books. I have gone into debt buying books and made poor financial choices, again and again, for the love of books -- buying a stack of glossy-covered novels instead of paying off bills, binge-ordering a dozen buzzed-about novels online instead of putting mon…”— Julia Fierro, amazon.com
“I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency. And I'm the emergency.”— Phillip Roth, newyorker.com
“You and your words flooded my senses. Your sentences left me defenseless. You built me palaces out of paragraphs. You built cathedrals.”— Phillipa Soo, play.spotify.com
“There is no secret password to being a writer. There is no secret code. You just do it.”— Lynee Tillman, thecreativeindependent.com
“To me, being a beauty editor was better than being president of the United States.”— Cat Marnell, amazon.com
“I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there’s something very satisfying about putting it into words.”— Carrie Fisher, avclub.com
“The third slice of bread on a club sandwich, I think, is a satanic invention.”— Anthony Bourdain, npr.org
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last br…”— Alan Watts, twitter.com
“All you need to be a writer is perseverance, a low-level alcohol dependency, and a questionable moral compass.”— Anna Kendrick, amazon.com
“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use—my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”— Allen Ginsberg, amazon.com